White supremacists react to Sikh massacre

August 06, 2012

Ryan Lenz

Message boards and forums across the racist radical right have erupted in the days following Wade Michael Page’s deadly rampage at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, with some racists calling the skinhead gunman “brother,” commending his actions on behalf of the white man and excoriating those who have tried to distance themselves from the racist cause.

Message boards and forums across the racist radical right have erupted in the days following Wade Michael Page’s deadly rampage at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, with some racists calling the skinhead gunman “brother,” commending his actions on behalf of the white man and excoriating those who have tried to distance themselves from the racist cause.

“Take your dead and go back to India and dump their ashes in the Ganges, Sikhs,” wrote Alex Linder, the foul-mouthed neo-Nazi who operates the racist website Vanguard News Network (VNN), on his forum. “You don’t belong here in the country my ancestors fought to found, and deeded to me and mine, their posterity. Even if you came here legally, and even if you haven’t done anything wrong personally. Go home, Sikhs. Go home to India where you belong. This is not your country, it belongs to white men.”

Others on VNN responded similarly, warning that Page was not alone in the threat he posed.

“[T]here are thousands of other angry White men like Page out there, the vast majority of them unknown,” a commenter named OTPTT wrote. “When will they, like Page, reach their breaking point, where they give up all hope for peaceful activism, and reach for their guns and start shooting at the first non-Whites they see?”

Larry Loper, head of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Hammerskins, a violent skinhead group, paid tribute to his fallen “brother” on Facebook. “I really don’t feel to disagree or agree what Wade did,” Loper wrote. “All I feel is loss and sympathy for a brother that was overwhelmed by pain and frustration. I could care less though for those injured and wounded other than Wade.”

The reaction comes as police continue to investigate the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism because of the targets of Page’s crime, his deep involvement in the racist music scene and his connections to the Hammerskin Nation, a network of regional skinhead factions that historically dominated the U.S. racist skinhead world.